Home / Away Advantage

February 2020

This was my first attempt at a sports viz and I have a lot to learn.

I stumbled across some football results for the main European leagues and started playing around with them in Tableau. I know little about football but the stark gap between home and away performance piqued my interest.

Across 10 seasons here's how the numbers stack up:

The bar bell plot packs in a lot of information and I was pretty pleased with such a clean result, but in truth this one was a fail.

It's a busy visualisation but I hadn't factored in the blindingly obvious about sports fans: They are stats mad! While this is a detailed piece for other topics, it's pretty shallow by sports standards.

The insight is obvious. Maybe too obvious?

That's not to say there isn't more to explore. Spanish clubs have marginally higher home advantage than other leagues and of these, Spain's island clubs seem to travel least well. Why?

It's one for another day.

Making this visualisation

Data source: DataHub.io (sports section)

Tools: I wrangled the data in Qlik Sense and visualised it with Tableau Public. Using two competing BI tools may sound odd but hey - each has its strengths. Why fight it?